Appeals Court Temporarily Allows Ban on Troops With Gender Dysphoria

The court said a lower court failed to give the military enough deference.

The Pentagon in seen from the Washington Monument in Washington, on Nov. 17, 2025. Madalina Kilroy/The Epoch Times

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has temporarily halted a lower court’s decision to halt the Trump administration’s ban on troops with gender dysphoria.

“The military is entitled to substantial deference in setting risk tolerances and evaluating conflicting evidence bearing on matters like force composition,” U.S. Circuit Judge Gregory Katsas wrote in an opinion released on Dec. 9. “Here, the evidence supporting the Hegseth Policy was more than sufficient to support the choices made,” he added, referring to the ban put in place by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.

The stay pending appeal came after a federal judge in Washington entered a preliminary injunction on the policy.

Circuit Judge Neomi Rao joined the 2–1 decision to stay the injunction.

A dissent from Circuit Judge Cornelia Pillard accused the military of animus.

“The majority’s decision makes it all but inevitable that thousands of qualified servicemembers will lose careers they have built over decades, drawn up short by a policy that would repay their commitment and service to our nation with detriment and derision,” she said.

Pillard added that “we should not accord deference to the military when the Department itself carelessly relied on no more than blatant animus.”

The legal dispute focused on the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law. U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes said the policy was a sex-based classification that discriminated.

In granting a preliminary injunction, she quoted Justice Neil Gorsuch in his majority opinion for Bostock v. Clayton County.

“The Supreme Court has recognized that it is ‘impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex,’” she said.

The case touched on questions percolating in the legal system over gender and the Constitution. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court weighed in on two cases and is expected to tackle similar cases in January. While it hasn’t offered final conclusions of law on the troop ban, it temporarily halted another preliminary injunction in a similar case to the one before the D.C. circuit.

It later issued a major decision backing Tennessee’s ban on the use of hormone drugs for minors’ gender “transitions.”

Both of those cases indicated the D.C. Circuit should halt Reyes’s order, Katsas said. In both Tennessee’s case and the troop ban, the government wasn’t discriminating against anyone based on their sex, but rather targeted certain medical conditions.

Katsas added that even if Hegseth’s policy involved some kind of sensitive classification, the military should be given greater deference than in other types of cases.

“The Hegseth Policy is likely constitutional because it reflects a considered judgment of military leaders and furthers legitimate military interests,” Katsas said. He pointed to things like military readiness, unit cohesion, and sex-based standards for physical fitness.

“In physically violent training and competition, such as boxing and combatives, pitting biological females against biological males who identify as female, and vice versa, could present a serious safety risk as well.”

Pillard said there was a lack of evidence that a stay was necessary to advance the military’s interest in a strong and ready military.

“The military has robust policies in place to remove servicemembers who pose a threat to military readiness and lethality, and transgender servicemembers are governed by those just like everyone else,” she said.

Pillard added that “if they have medical conditions affecting their ability to serve, the military can make individualized assessments through the Disability Evaluation System and remove any transgender servicemember as to whom the assessment confirms a service impediment.”